ROAD . Summertime in the storefronts is the season when new companies try their wings, frequently using the Steppenwolf model: a lot of people who went to the same university get together to put on a show. For their frosh effort -- Jim Cartwright's "Road" -- the Purdue University grads behind Ka-Tet Theatre Company also brought in the chairman of the theater department, Richard Stockton Rand, to direct. The result? Pretty impressive, especially considering that the last...

"Tet" is the Vietnamese name for the Lunar New Year, which begins Jan. 31. Celebrate the Year of the Horse by working citrus, symbolic of good fortune, into your menus. Here are two recipes from two cookbook authors of Vietnamese descent, Luke Nguyen of Australia and California-based Andrea Nguyen (The two are friends but not family, Andrea Nguyen says.) - Bill Daley, Tribune Newspapers Pomelo and crab salad Prep: 25 minutes Cook: 6 minutes Makes: 4 to 6...

Practically everyone who follows Chicago music knows Mwata Bowden, a phenomenally versatile reedist, bandleader and composer. As a key figure in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Bowden for decades has anchored top experimental-jazz ensembles. Less known is the innovative ensemble Bowden leads at the University of Chicago -- the Jazz X-tet, which performs avant-garde repertory with the same scholarship and stylistic authenticity that the Chicago...

Rachel Axler is a former writer for "The Daily Show" and currently writes for "Parks and Recreation," but her 2010 play "Smudge," now in its local premiere with Ka-Tet Theatre Company, doesn't show any clear fingerprints from that resume. Instead, it's an uneasy plunge into murky existential waters, using a severely disabled child as a conceptual canvas for her parents' explorations into the value and purpose of life. Unlike the progeria-afflicted teenager in David...

Thirty-six years after the Tet offensive that helped break U.S. resolve in the Vietnam War, young Vietnamese have put the bitter struggle in the past and embraced an America they see as a source of hope. Interest in the U.S. was evident here Thursday as the Year of the Monkey began with Tet, as the Lunar New Year is called in Vietnam. A midnight fireworks display exploded above more than 100,000 people along the Saigon River. Among the thousands of young people...

ROAD . Summertime in the storefronts is the season when new companies try their wings, frequently using the Steppenwolf model: A lot of people who went to the same university get together to put on a show. For their frosh effort -- Jim Cartwright's "Road" -- the Purdue University grads behind Ka-Tet Theatre Company also brought in the chairman of the theater department, Richard Stockton Rand, to direct. The result? Pretty impressive, especially considering that the last...

By David Evans, The Tribune`s military affairs wrter | January 31, 1988

Twenty years ago this weekend, I was a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, providing artillery support to infantrymen engaged in just one of the hundreds of battles of the 1968 Tet offensive by the Viet Cong. Now, two decades later, my feelings and thoughts about those hectic days remain contradictory, even a touch schizophrenic. There was the euphoria that comes from winning stunning tactical victories, wrought by American troops who fought well, sometimes superbly. Returning home a few months later, I...

Four decades back? Can't be. The year 1968 -- historically profound, politically momentous, artistically revolutionary -- is still going on, still surrounding us, still repeating its crucial notes, like a record on the turntable with a skip in it. In the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama, on track to be the Democratic presidential nominee for 2008, many people hear distinct echoes of the vigorous idealism of those Kennedy brothers, John and Robert,...

There may be hope yet for art music in America. Certainly when a capacity audience -- mostly young -- turns out to hear some of the boldest music in the jazz avant-garde, there's cause to celebrate. All the more when the musicians themselves haven't yet reached drinking age (judging by appearances, anyway). Yet there they were, the gifted students of the University of Chicago Jazz X-tet, performing some of the thorniest scores in the experimental repertoire to exuberant ovations Thursday...

On Jan. 30, 1649, England's King Charles I was beheaded. In 1882 Franklin Roosevelt, the only president elected four times, was born in Hyde Park, N.Y. In 1933 Adolf Hitler became Germany's chancellor. In 1948 Indian spiritual leader Mohandas Gandhi, 78, was slain by a Hindu fanatic in New Delhi. Also, aviation pioneer Orville Wright died at 76 in Dayton, Ohio. In 1968 the Vietnam War's bloody Tet offensive began as communist forces launched attacks against provincial capitals in the South.

Neal Creighton did an excellent job in his guest column, "When hearts and minds were lost," characterizing the Tet offensive as a military debacle for the Communist forces but a tremendous propaganda victory. The war changed radically after Tet, as did American attitudes and support. Left unsaid in this article was the role the media played in that historical epoch. From the beginning of the Tet offensive throughout the rest of the Vietnam War, Tet was consistently reported as a military defeat for the American...

Practically everyone who follows Chicago music knows Mwata Bowden, a phenomenally versatile reedist, bandleader and composer. As a key figure in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Bowden for decades has anchored top experimental-jazz ensembles. Less known is the innovative ensemble Bowden leads at the University of Chicago -- the Jazz X-tet, which performs avant-garde repertory with the same scholarship and stylistic authenticity that the Chicago...

Torque-Tet: Walk in Space (Cosmosis). One never ceases to be amazed by the range of avant-garde groups emerging in Chicago, with the relatively new Torque-Tet ensemble standing among the best. The quartet's first CD, "Walk in Space," indeed hints at the "space music" of Sun Ra, another great musical adventurer who launched his revolution in Chicago. But the link to Sun Ra is essentially conceptual, for Torque-Tet has formed a musical language all its own; it's...

President Bush said Wednesday that it was possible that the surge in violence in Iraq was comparable to the Vietnam War's Tet offensive, which is considered a turning point in that conflict. The comparison was made Wednesday by columnist Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. He asserted that "what we're seeing there seems like the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive." In an interview with Bush, ABC's George Stephanopoulos brought up Friedman's column and quoted White House...

Big Story: How the Press and Television Reported the Crisis of Tet in 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, by Peter Braestrup (Presidio, 16.95). Despite the recent revelations of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, much remains to be learned about the Vietnam War, and here is a big book, newly revised to incorporate recollections of North Vietnamese, about the surprise offensive, known as Tet (because it...

By David Pierson and Mai Tran, Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times | September 2, 2006

They're as integral to Vietnamese and Chinese holidays as turkey is to Thanksgiving. One consists of rice cake sopping in the juices from fatty pork, tucked into leaves and tied together like a present. Another is a hockey puck-sized mound of delicate brown crust wrapped around a rich lotus paste and a duck egg yolk. In recent years, however, the moon cakes and other delicacies have become targets of food inspectors, who have cited merchants for allowing the treats to sit at...

About 2,000 people jammed into the Aragon Ballroom on Saturday evening to celebrate Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year, amid aromatic servings of chao tom (shrimp cooked on a stab of sugar-cane) and dried beef with papaya. Revelers from neighboring states and from all over Illinois came to close out the old year and welcome 4691, the Year of The Rooster, with much merriment and a unique cultural stew. With three alternating lead singers, The Heartbeat, the most popular Vietnamese band...

The war in Iraq has begun to seep into American theater. Each year, the Contemporary American Theater Festival here presents four new and usually cutting-edge works, often including world premieres. This summer, three of the four offerings have to do with the Iraq war or the GWOT (Pentagonese for "Global War on Terrorism," of which the Pentagon views the Iraq struggle an integral part). The most attention-getting is Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell," a biting polemic against what is...